Harlem Stage Announces 2023 WaterWorks Emerging Artists Cohort

Harlem Stage has announced the 2023 cohort for its WaterWorks Emerging Artists program: interdisciplinary performing artist and painter Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson; singer/songwriter Hannah Lemmons; choreographer and dancer Bobby Morgan; interdisciplinary artist, composer, and pianist Mary Prescott; and trumpeter and composer Kalí Rodríguez-Peña. Part of Harlem Stage's signature commissioning program, WaterWorks, the Emerging Artists program is designed to support early-career artists of color, and those growing new aspects of their artistic practice.

WaterWorks encourages artists to continue to push boundaries, expanding their chosen art forms and creative instincts. The program offers artists a spot among a multidisciplinary cohort, commissioning support, mentorship, critical feedback, and professional development opportunities. Throughout the year-long program, artists will develop an original performance piece, to be presented as part of a work-in-progress showcase, at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse in December 2023.

The WaterWorks Emerging Artists program, formerly Fund for New Work (FFNW), has provided commissioning grants to emerging artists of color for nearly three decades. Through the years, the program's impact has been expansive, with artists and works who premiered and developed as part of WaterWorks going on to be presented at national and international venues and festivals including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Danspace Project, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, New York Live Arts, and more. Previous award recipients include choreographers Camille A. Brown and Kyle Abraham, musicians Craig Harris and Deidre Murray, poet Carlos Andrés Gómez, and multidisciplinary artists Derrick Hodge, Maija Garcia, and Sekou Sundiata.

2023 WaterWorks Emerging Artists Bios/Project Descriptions

Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson

Jackson's performance for WaterWorks is built upon individual experience and the unexpected beauty of co-created temporary autonomous zones in an increasingly unsafe world. The physical investigation is a search for sanctuary, and its imprint is marked on canvases that live on as witness.

Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson is an artist whose performance practice explores collaborative storytelling through improvised physical theater and painting. Her past collaborations include Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, Urban Bush Women, Paloma McGregor, Daria Faïn and The Commons Choir, luciana achugar, Antonio Ramos & The Gang Bangers, Walter Dundervill, Allison Chase, Mia Habib, slowdanger, and Maestro Flux. Her work is influenced by her studies with The Unseen Hand and her teacher Laura Clarke Stelmok. She is a performer, painter, facilitator, and the artistic director of loveconductors, a Brooklyn-based human movement project which composes performance through shared practice across multiple media. The collective arose during Shantelle's Movement Research Van Lier Fellowship in 2016. Her work has been presented at JACK, Movement Research at the Judson Church, FAB Arts Salon, BAAD, Chez Bushwick (AIR), Brooklyn Studios for Dance, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, The Kitchen, and Mabou Mines. Shantelle was a 2021 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a 2022 Mabou Mines Suite/Space Artist, and a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Finalist (Jerome Foundation).

Hannah Lemmons

Lemmons describes this intimate, live, filmed concert experience, complete with full band and narrative storytelling, as a cross between aspects of NPR Tiny Desk Concert performances and Janelle Monáe's "emotion picture" Dirty Computer. The performance will blend genres of R&B, jazz, and pop encapsulated in both Lemmons' 5-song EP, Like The Fruit, and three-to-four new works. It aims to answer the question: What does it mean to live in a world where queer Black women and people are not born to sing the blues? What does that place of longing and belonging sound and feel like.

Hannah Lemmons, also known as LEMMONS, is a singer/songwriter from Denver, Colorado. She has worked with Esperanza Spalding, Yosvany Terry, Don Braden, and Craig Derry. She is a recipient of the 2021 Emerging Visionary Grant from SheaMoisture x GOOD MIRRORS, and was featured in Raveena's artist spotlight series in 2021. Most recently, she opened for acclaimed vocalist Amber Riley and was featured in Citizen Magazine Issue 002, covered by Kendrick Lamar. Her debut EP, Like The Fruit, released on October 15, 2022 and is available on all platforms. LEMMONS hopes her music will empower people who imagine worlds - those who seek to create impossibilities. Her musical inspirations include Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, and Norah Jones. Her style is characterized by ethereal, layered vocals and bouncy production with an alternative beat, reminiscent of the likes of Moses Sumney, Lianne La Havas, and Ms. Lauryn Hill.

Bobby Morgan

After The Rain/Remembrance

After The Rain/Remembrance acknowledges nature's need for moments of rain and downpour in order for life itself to flourish, considering the hardships of the last three years within this framework. It uses life's "low" moments as catalysts for spiritual, emotional, and mental growth, considering how rain can be cleansing and purifying, clearing a pathway for inspiration. Says Morgan, "My mission with this production is to spark the inspiration and love frequency we all have deep within ourselves. We have the power to alchemize our lives and write our own narratives for ourselves, in honor of ancestors that predated us...remembering that we are them."

Bobby Morgan is a choreographer and student of life based in NYC. His dance background includes styles such as: ballet, jazz, hip hop, house, voguing, modern, and contemporary. Morgan's main source of passion is his love for music. For him, music is usually the source from which movement stems, along with an ancestral connection to rhythm that comes from within. Having grown up in concert and commercial dance worlds, one of Morgan's missions as a choreographer is to curate spaces for those that live in between both. Throughout his training, summers were spent at Complexions, Ballet Hispanico (Choreographer's Lab), and Jacob's Pillow, while also being on scholarship at commercial dance conventions (Monsters of Hip Hop, Intrigue, ASH). Morgan trained under choreographers such as Dana Foglia, Desmond Richardson, Erica Sobol, Jon Ole Olstad, and many others among the concert, commercial, and underground street worlds.

Kalí Rodríguez-Peña

For his project, Kalí Rodríguez-Peña will write music inspired by interviews with multiple generations of Cubans on social developments in the country across the last 64 years, and the factors that led to the current crisis the island is facing. Rodríguez-Peña will also write new works developed from material taken from contemporary Cuban popular music, traditional Cuban music genres, and jazz. Says Rodríguez-Peña, the project "will be an opportunity to explore my roots and will allow me to share with New York audiences a unique moment in one of the most influential musical cultures of the past century."

Born in Havana, Cuba, trumpeter and composer Kalí Rodríguez-Peña has played with renowned musicians such as Wynton Marsalis, Arturo O'Farrill, Paquito D'Rivera, Chucho Valdés, Michel Camilo, David Murray, and Cándido Camero. In 2016, he was a finalist at the National Trumpet Competition. In Havana, he won top prizes at the JoJazz contest for improvisation. He has performed at the top venues and festivals of the USA and Canada including Montreal Jazz Festival, Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, Symphony Space, Birdland, Dizzy's Club, Black Cat (SF), Freight and Salvage (Berkeley), and Dieze Once (Montreal). In 2019, he graduated from the renowned Manhattan School of Music where he studied under the tutelage of Jon Faddis and Stefon Harris. He was a guest lecturer at the University of California, Riverside. Rodríguez-Peña also participated in the albums Familia by Arturo O'Farrill and Chucho Valdés, as well as Michel Camilo's Essence and Pedrito Martínez's Acertijos.

Mary Prescott

Ancestral Table

Ancestral Table is a shared family meal, interdisciplinary performance, and docuseries that examines the relationships between ecology, migration, cultural inheritance, and maternal legacy through the lens of one woman's Thai family recipes.

Mary Prescott is a Thai-American interdisciplinary artist, composer, and pianist who explores the foundations and facets of identity and social conditions through experiential performance. The Washington Post describes her work as "masterfully envisioned... a bright light cast forward." Prescott has received awards from the McKnight Composer Fellowship, NPN Creation and Development Fund, New Music USA, Puffin Foundation, Opera America, and several regional arts councils. Her commissioners include American Composers Forum, Living Arts, Public Functionary, White Snake Projects, The American Opera Project, and Metropolis Ensemble. She has held residencies with Roulette, Lanesboro Arts, Avaloch Farm, Virginia Center for the Arts, and Arts Letters and Numbers, and was a 2022 Mabou Mines SUITE/Space Artist.

About Harlem Stage

Harlem Stage is the performing arts center that bridges Harlem's cultural legacy to contemporary artists of color and dares to provide the artistic freedom that gives birth to new ideas.

For nearly 40 years, the organization's singular mission has been to perpetuate and celebrate the unique and diverse artistic legacy of Harlem and the indelible impression it has made on American culture. Harlem Stage provides opportunity, commissioning, and support for visionary artists of color, makes performances easily accessible to all audiences, and introduces children to the rich diversity, excitement, and inspiration of the performing arts.

Harlem Stage fulfills its mission through commissioning, incubating, and presenting innovative and vital work that responds to the historical and contemporary conditions that shape our lives and the communities the organization serves.

With a long-standing tradition of supporting artists and organizations around the corner and across the globe, Harlem Stage boasts such legendary artists as Harry Belafonte, Max Roach, Sekou Sundiata, Abbey Lincoln, Sonia Sanchez, Eddie Palmieri, Maya Angelou, and Tito Puente, as well as contemporary artists like Mumu Fresh, Jason "Timbuktu" Diakité, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Tamar-kali, Vijay Iyer, Mike Ladd, Meshell Ndegeocello, Jason Moran, José James, Nona Hendryx, Bill T. Jones, and more. Harlem Stage's education programs serve over 2,300 New York City school children each year.

The New York Times has saluted Harlem Stage as "an invaluable incubator of talent" and it has been hailed as an organization still unafraid to take risks. Harlem Stage's investment in this visionary talent is often awarded in the early stages of many artists' careers, and the organization proudly celebrates their increasing success. Five members of its artist family have joined the ranks of MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship awardees: Kyle Abraham (2013), Vijay Iyer (2013), Jason Moran (2010), Bill T. Jones (1994), and Cecil Taylor (1991).

Harlem Stage is a winner of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters William Dawson Award for Programming Excellence and Sustained Achievement in Programming.

For more information visit: https://www.harlemstage.org/

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